Fine Art & Graphic Design Club

Cardboard Art

Cardboard as an art medium emerged in the early 1900s, during the Cubist and Dada movements. The most famous Cubist example is Pablo Picasso’s Still Life with Guitar. Dada artists Marcel Janco and Kurt Schwitters used cardboard in different ways. Janco made masks worn in Dadaist plays at Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich. Kurt Schwitters used trash, debris and printed material to make art which he called Merz. His largest creation was Merzbau a large installation made with cardboard, found materials and personal objects. It was immersive and encompassed eight rooms of his house. During World War ll it was destroyed and later reconstructed and permanently installed in the Sprengel Museum, Hannover.

Students have been exploring various ways of making cardboard artworks either individually or in groups. They have also been experimenting with combining cardboard and other materials like styrofoam and plaster either individually or in groups.

The Cardboards are wall reliefs made from found cardboard boxes that have been cut, stapled, bent, and combined by the artist but retain their original history through stains, dents, and tears, in addition to inherent colour and labelling.